Welcome to HAU4, the stage for digital culture at HAU Hebbel am Ufer!
At the start of the 2020 / 2021 season, we announced a fourth, digital stage alongside HAU1, HAU2 and HAU3. For HAU4, HAU Hebbel am Ufer produces and presents projects that are developed specifically for the online space.
With HAU4, we are creating a platform where digital culture, art, gaming, performance, and discourse intersect and new technologies are explored. In view of the digital transformation of society, we are collaborating with artists to experiment with ways of thinking and acting that forge meaningful connections between the analog and digital worlds. After all, current social issues cannot be discussed without a technological perspective.
In addition to current projects, HAU4 also features selected works that remain available in our archive, the HAUthek, after their premiere. We want to keep the HAUthek as vibrant as possible, so you can find information about projects that are no longer available online at hebbel-am-ufer.de.The programme schedule displays all upcoming and past HAU4 events in calendar format. If productions are not hosted directly on HAU4, we provide links to external platforms.
What unites HAU4 projects is an approach that is both positive and critical towards digital technology. For example, we combine queer-feminist utopias at pleasurable intersections between technology and the body with exploring and experimenting with digital tools.
Alongside playful practice, It is central to us to address our own entanglement in the power structures surrounding digital technology. For we are confronted daily with a global politics in which the expansion of authoritarian systems and current technological developments are deeply intertwined. In our resource-rich artistic work with digital tools, artificial intelligence systems, or social media, the artists and we navigate a paradox that cannot be resolved as long as we remain socially dependent on tech corporations to the extent that we currently are. For us, this contradictory situation is the central motivation for an intervention and for the development and visualization of hopeful alternatives.
HAU4 participants hack distances, surfaces, bodies, and binaries. They analyze, visualize, and deconstruct power structures. The presented works highlight alternative visions to enable non-commercial forms of narration, interaction, and participation, as well as diverse communities. Since capitalist and patriarchal structures of the analog world persist in virtual space, the central question is how we can successfully develop digital tools so that they do not reproduce forms of oppression such as racism, sexism, and ableism.
As an institution, but also as a society, we are learning the digital alphabet at the moment of application, and it will have changed again by tomorrow. HAU4 expands with each new project. We find ourselves among a multitude of data streams and try not to lose the balance between fluid immersion and critical distance.
HAU sees itself as a learning institution. It is up to us – to use the words of the artist duo NewfrontEars – to allow for a productive “awkwardness” that can arise in the encounter between human and non-human intelligences, and to view transmission errors as opportunities to look beyond the surface of technology.
We look forward to new encounters and ongoing dialogue with many Berlin-based, national, and international partners who, together with us, want to shape a digital civil society that formulates strategies for the society of the future.
May 2026